In an effort to win support, Guderian asked Hitler for a
conference at which he could expound his views to the Führer and
a few senior commanders, and his notes for this conference open with
a categorical assertion:
The task for 1943 is to provide a certain number of
panzer
divisions with complete combat efficiency capable of making limited
objective attacks.
For 1944
we must
prepare to launch large-scale attacks.
Thus he could expect opposition, not only from all the specialists
who felt their own departmental authority threatened, and from the
General Staff, which resented his extraordinary powers, but his whole
audience could unite in protest before the Führer at the
pusillanimity of allowing a whole year to pass with nothing more
heroic than "limited objective attacks."
Furthermore. Guderian had, most imprudently, sent a précis
of his notes to the office of Hitler's adjutant in advance of his
arrival. The result was that on his arrival at Vinnitsa, on 9th
March, he had to face not a small and select audience but a large and
disgruntled General Staff clique, including the senior officers of
infantry and artillery (who were particularly concerned to retain
their authority over the assault guns), and many other artillery
officers. Panzer commanders were conspicuous by their absence.
Undaunted, the Inspector General proceeded with his address, which
included reading aloud an article by Liddell Hart on "Armour for
the Attack"!
[The article had first appeared in the
Daily Mail
of 21st
December, 1942. Guderian's notes for this conference offer a salutary
corrective to the view that the German Army was "finished"
after Stalingrad.]
"A Panzer division," he told his listeners, "only
has complete combat efficiency when the number of its tanks is in
correct proportion to its other weapons and vehicles." The
original composition of a Panzer division, Guderian reminded them,
was four tank battalions, and it was at this target, of four hundred
tanks in each division, that he intended to aim.
It is better to have a few strong divisions than many partially
equipped ones. The latter type need a large quantity of wheeled
vehicles, fuel and personnel, which is quite disproportionate to
their effectiveness; they are a burden, both to command and supply,
and they block the roads.
Guderian had already complained to Hitler about the alteration of
the definitive footnote in his Assignment of Duties. He now tried to
convince his audience that in order to attain the required figure of
armoured strength in individual Panzer divisions, it would be
necessary to draw in the self-propelled guns from non-Panzer
formations, and to direct all future production into the Panzer
divisions proper. But at this suggestion
. . . the whole conference became incensed. All those present,
with the single exception of Speer, disapproved, in particular of
course, the gunners; Hitler's chief adjutant also spoke up against
me, remarking that the assault artillery was the only weapon which
nowadays enabled gunners to win the Knight's Cross.
Hitler gazed at me with an expression of pity on his face, and
finally said, "You see, they're all against you. So I can't
approve either."
In this way the development of the Panzer force was stunted at the
outset. But in spite of this the tactical reforms inaugurated by
Guderian and Speer's overhaul of the production machine combined
faster even than Hitler expected to build up a very formidable
striking force. By early summer all the Panzer divisions in the south
had been taken out of the line and rested, and in battalions which
were being re-equipped with the Tiger and the Panther the crews had
been sent back to Germany for training and familiarisation courses at
the factory. The result was a marked revival of morale and
confidence—although it helped to defeat Gudderian's larger
purpose, as it was grist to the mill of those who could not wait
before launching another major operation. But before examining the
background to these decisions (which Guderian himself consistently
opposed from the start) it is necessary to look at another aspect of
the German "consolidation program" of 1943.
After the first period of haphazard oppression and brutality the
German attitude to the occupied East became more systematic. As the
probable duration of the war lengthened into the distance, so the
attractions of the East as a vast reservoir of slave labour had
grown, and in March 1942 a special office of labour "allocation,"
the
Generalbevollmächter für den Arbeitseinsatz
,
henceforth referred to as the GBA, was established. The GBA started
off as a subsidiary of the Four-Year-Plan, but soon grew to be a
sovereign power in its own right, competing with the rival
authorities of SS,
Ostministerium
, and military government to
multiply the administrative chaos which prevailed in the whole
territory, and whose overworked relief valve was the suffering of the
Russian people.
[The politics of Nazi administration in the early days of the War
are discussed in Ch. 3.]
Head of the GBA was Fritz Sauckel, a second-string Nazi who had
missed out on the first round of appointments and was intent on
making up for his late start. Sauckel had originally been recommended
by Rosenberg for that plum of the "golden pheasants," the
Ukraine, but had been defeated by Koch. Once installed at the GBA, he
lost no time before ordering his erstwhile protector about:
I must ask you to exhaust all possibilities for speedily
shipping the maximum number of men to the Reich; recruitment quotas
are to be trebled immediately.
To a Gauleiter conference Sauckel declared:
The unparalleled strain of this war compels us, in the name of
the Führer, to mobilise many millions of foreigners for labour
in the German total war economy, and
to make them work at maximum
capacity
. . .
You may rest assured that in my measures ... I am guided by
neither sentimentality nor romanticism . . .
Familiarity with the utterances of Nazi executives allows us to
recognise that translucent veneer which precedes and accompanies
measures of the most horrific brutality—and the actions of the
GBA are no exception. Masses of Russian civilians were swept up at
random and press-ganged into unheated freight cars with neither food
nor sanitation. They were given no time to collect their belongings
or even to tell their families, and many, need it be said, died on
the journey
after being exposed to arbitrary abuse by the accompanying
German personnel.
The result was that still more of the population went underground
and joined the Partisans, and passive hostility to the Germans became
universal. The administration retaliated by treating "evasion"
of the labour draft on a par with Partisan activity. An OKW report
dated 13th July, 1943, speaks of
an intensification of countermeasures : among others,
confiscation of grain and property; burning down of houses; forcible
concentration; tying down and mishandling of those assembled;
forcible abortion of pregnant women.
"The population reacts particularly strongly," it was
woodenly recorded, ". . . against the forcible separation of
mothers from their babies, and of school children from their
families." In the Ukraine, province of the sadistic Koch, scenes
of not so much mediaeval as of pre-Roman barbarism were a daily
occurrence as columns of "labour volunteers" were driven
through the streets to the marshalling yards by guards with stock
whips.
Relatives of departing workers were not allowed to hand them
food and clothes, the crying women being ruthlessly pushed into the
muddy streets with rifle butts.
The requirements of the GBA began almost immediately to clash with
the activities of the SS, and each organization blamed the other for
"deficiencies"; their complaints echoing higher and higher
into the Nazi stratosphere, where they further poisoned and obscured
the personal relations of the Diadochi. SS General Stahlecker had to
submit a report on the fact that only 42,000 Jews had been killed out
of a total of 170,000 registered in the area of operations allotted
to
Einsatzgruppe A
. Apologetically he offered a double excuse:
. . . the Jews form an extraordinarily high proportion of
specialists who cannot be spared because of the absence of other
reserves. Furthermore, Einsatzgruppe "A" only took over the
area after the severe frosts set in, which made mass executions more
difficult to carry out...
With the advent of warmer weather, though, it seems that this
particular problem was eliminated, for Kube was able to report, "In
the past ten weeks we have liquidated about 50,000 Jews ... In the
rural areas of Minsk, Jewry has been eradicated without jeopardising
the labour situation."
Nonetheless, the "labour situation" was deteriorating,
owing to the increasing failure of the GBA to fulfil its quotas
through the local commissariat machinery. To Sauckel's complaints the
Reich commissars excused themselves by blaming the SS, whose
"reckless" anti-Partisan activity was alienating the
population. By Directive No. 46, of August 1942, Hitler had formally
taken the responsibility for "order" in the zones of the
civil administration out of the province of OKW and granted it to
Himmler. Himmler had delegated the task to SS General von dem
Bach-Zelewski, an energetic thug for whom the Führer had a
particular admiration.
[Readers will be interested to learn that Bach was not brought to
trial until 1951. A German court in Munich then gave him a ten-year
"suspended sentence."]
"Von dem Bach is so clever," Hitler would say, "he
can do anything, get around anything." (It should be pointed out
that what we understand by "clever" Hitler would describe
as "artistic"; he used to say that Goebbels and Speer were
"artistic." The nearest translation which we can get for
Hitler's "clever" is "unscrupulous.")
After the disastrous winter of 1942-43, when the Partisans were in
control of huge areas of central Russia, Bach had instituted a series
of "drives" in which tracts of "suspected"
territory were systematically laid waste, the villages burned down,
and the inhabitants killed on the spot.
Even Kube was put out by this. How could he fulfil his labour
obligations, he asked, under such conditions?
The political effect of this enterprise on the peaceful
population is disastrous, because of the shooting of so many women
and children.
The pacific Lohse was even more outspoken:
Should this take place without regard for age and sex and
economic interest, for instance the Wehrmacht's need for specialists
in armament plants?
The SS was not going to stand still while a few weak-willed
civilians attempted to saddle it with the results of their own
incompetence. By the transmission of orders directly to GBA
officials, instead of passing them back to Himmler and across to
Sauckel, the SS was trying to confirm its supreme authority with one
more intruder in the occupied area. At Christmas 1942 "Gestapo
Müller" had drafted an order, the opening sentence of which
still chills the blood:
For reasons of military importance, which need not be
elaborated further, the RFSS and Chief of the German Police has
ordered that by the end of January 1943 at the latest, at least
35,000 able-bodied persons be transferred to concentration camps. In
order to attain this figure, beginning immediately . . . workers who
have tried to escape or violated their contracts [sic] are to be
delivered as fast as possible to the nearest concentration camp.
The "reasons of military importance" were the desire for
more subjects for experiment. These experiments were medical and
sexual, of the crudest kind, and it may be thought that 35,000 more
than exhausted the various permutations that science could devise for
their suffering. However, by this time the labour situation was so
critical that the GBA was extremely reluctant to release this number,
and Sauckel was coming under fire from another quarter.
To the practical men of OKH the indiscriminate oppression of the
civilians in the rear areas was a constant source of irritation.
Furthermore
... if labour recruitment continues, the danger could arise
that Army and local war economy demands will no longer be met. It is
also necessary to leave certain labour reserves in the Army Group
Area for a possible building of fortifications.
Kleist even went so far as to draft a special memorandum ordering
that recruitment be solely on a voluntary basis—and took steps
to see that "voluntary" meant what it said.
This drew an immediate howl of protest from Koch, who made Sauckel
send Hitler a telegram:
Unfortunately several Commanding Generals in the East have
forbidden the labour conscription of men and women in the conquered
Soviet territories—for political reasons, as Gauleiter Koch
informs me. [This was a lie.] My Führer! I ask you to
countermand these orders so as to enable me to carry out my
assignment.
No sympathy need be wasted on Sauckel, a typical representative of
the Nazi breed of administrator, of whom too few shared his ultimate
fate—judicial hanging. But it must be conceded that his job was
not a happy one. Under pressure from four sides; from Speer in the
Armaments Ministry, from Goering under the Four-Year Plan, from the
SS and the army commanders, he soon found himself falling from favour
at the Nazi court. In his diary for 24th April, 1943, Goebbels
recorded:
Speer came in late in the afternoon. He remained until the
evening, which gave me a chance to discuss the general situation
fully with him. He has had a long talk with Goering, and what he
reported to me about it was all to the good. Goering has so far
adhered to our line and intends to do so in future. Speer, however,
also reported that he still gives the impression of a rather tired
man.